EXPANDING
THE WAR: THE PUBLIC OPINION BATTLE

The
past week saw some significant developments in the struggle over American war
aims, developments likely to foreshadow larger battles ahead. Bush's State of
the Union speech has altered the landscape, signaling to the world the president's
seeming acquiescence to the most bellicose voices within his administration.The campaign against Osama bin Laden, al-Qaeda, and the Taliban 
the groups responsible for the 9-11 atrocity  was moved to the back burner.A new war against "evil" – as defined
by the Bill Kristol-Paul Wolfowitz-Weekly Standard neoconservative group
 is now being prepared.

But
last week saw the emergence of new buds of opposition.Two of the country's most liked, respected, and, importantly, most centrist
columnists wrote pieces arguing that the administration was carrying out a bait
and switch operation, trying to shift the war against terrorists who attacked
Americans into a war against Muslim states we don't like (or, more precisely,
states that the neoconservative faction in the administration, opinion and think
tank worlds doesn't care for).

Conservative
voices in the anti-war movement  this site, Pat Buchanan, somewhat indirectly
Robert Novak, Chronicles Magazine, and several others have been making
this argument for months. For the most part, antiwar voices on the Right have
not questionedthe need to destroy al-Qaeda
and topple the Taliban, and has shed no tears over the alleged mistreatment
of captured al-Qaeda fighters. But they don't want that necessary war to lead
into a wider campaignagainst Middle Eastern countries where the US has adversarial relationships,
but which pose no real threat to the United States.

Now
Michael
Kinsley and Chris
Matthews, nothing if not solid centrists, have taken up the same point.
Neither holds any brief for the Iranian mullahs, Saddam Hussein, or the North
Korean dictatorship. Neither is a pacifist, isolationist, or movement antiwar
person. Where they part company with Bush and the War Party claque is in recognizing
that Bush has no authority fromCongress
nor American public opinion to transform the war against terror into war against
countries we don't like for other reasons. The pro-war factionhopes that the American people somehow won't notice that their outrage
against those who killed 3,000 Americans is being used to pursue a war against
Israel's potential enemies, a campaign long desired by the Beltway neocons.

The
Kinsley and Matthews columns are indisputable evidence that alarm over Bush's
bait and switch operation is seeping into the mainstream.If,
as I believe likely, these two columnists are harbingers of broader shift in
middle-of-road opinion, it could save the United States from the disastrous
quagmire of war against much of the Muslim world.

In
support of this optimistic interpretation, it ought to be noted that some of
the principled neoconservative war pundits are beginning to worry about support
for the wider war among the public. Both Ronald
Radosh and David
Brooks have written recently about Norman Podhoretz's "World War 4"
address, delivered last weekat the
American Enterprise Institute. Podhoretz worried that Bush's war against the
"Axis of Evil" couldbring about internal divisions as sharp as
the United States faced in the 1960's.In
discussing this possibility,Radosh
referred hopefully to the long "Just
War letter" produced by the Institute for American Values'David Blankenhorn and signed by 60 academics, several of them quite prominent
and coming from a wide range on the political spectrum.

The
letter is long, nuanced, and as Podhoretz rightly noted in his address, eerilydefensive
in tone, as if designed to account for every possible objection. Its bottom
line is that United States military response to the 9/11 terrorists is justified
according to Just War doctrine. The fact is that I (and I imagine, other writers
on this site) would have few objections to signing the Blankenhorn statement
ourselves.But it is curious to see
it being wheeled out by the War Party now  (it was also touted last week on the Wall Street Journal's
pro-wider war editorial page) as if it could serve as a religious/philosophical
foundation stone for an expanded campaign against Iran and Iraq.For unless there are clauses in it too obscure
for me to penetrate, nothing in the letter would justify a pre-emptive American
strike against Bagdhad and Teheran because they might one day seek to develop
the same kinds of weapons already in the arsenals of Pakistan, India, and Israel.
Indeed, the letter is being used as something that many of its signers almost
certainly did not intend  a document to ratify the transmutation of the
Just War against al-Qaeda into a pre-emptive war against Iran and Iraq, a bait
and switch for the PhD's.

Despite
its success in inserting recklessly belligerent phrases into Bush's State of
the Union speech, the War Party occupies a vulnerable position in the broad
geography of American politics. Its core members understand full well that the
American rage against terrorists who attacked us is not the same as an American
desire to take out every country that has ever looked cross-eyed at Israel.
They worry, with increasing openness, that American public opinion will not
support a wider war, and (more quietly) that Bush himself will eventually retreat
from that precipice. They have instigated opinion molding exercises that were
hardly necessary in October and November, (when virtually everyone understood
why we needed to rout bin Laden and the Taliban); they now face for the first
time open complaints about the transmutation of war aims from prominent, popular
and indisputably centrist sources.Elected
officials may not be that far behind, and if a sensible peace movement gets
rolling quickly enough, the United States may yet save itself from embarking
on a tragic blunder.

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